On Voting Republicans Out Of Office

The SBA is always investing in small business. As for the solar firm, Chinese dumping put it out of business. No wrong doing was ever found.

Hey, cold brain, you should do some research before posting stuff that's not totally true.

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/12/ron-pelosis-connection-to-tonopah-solar-energy/

Nancy Pelosi's brother-in-law can't control or get any benefit from that money, and the DOE expects to be repaid for that loan.

cold brain is brain dead.

Mitch McConnell Says He Stood Up for Women in a Senate Sexual-Harassment Scandal. The Real Story Is Damning.
McConnell claims he led a 1995 investigation against a GOP senator accused of sexual misconduct. Actually, he took steps to keep it quiet.

—By Molly Redden
| Fri Apr. 18, 2014 3:00 AM PDT
204


Facing his toughest reelection battle in years against a well-known and well-financed female opponent, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently boasted that he led the Senate in ousting a GOP colleague accused of sexual harassment in 1995. But news reports from that time show that late in the investigation, McConnell tried to stall the probe against his fellow Republican, Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.). He derided efforts by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to hold public hearings on Packwood as "frolic and detour"—after the Senate ethics committee had substantiated nearly two-dozen claims of sexual harassment leveled against Packwood by female lobbyists and former staffers.

Talking about the Packwood scandal this past week, McConnell noted that he was chair of the Senate ethics committee when Packwood resigned. In a Tuesday interview with the Lexington Herald-Leader, McConnell said he had taken "the toughest possible position." The newspaper reported that McConnell had "offered himself as an example of how elected officials should handle situations when a member of their own party is accused of sexual harassment."

But the bulk of the ethics probe against Packwood took place when the committee was chaired by a Democrat. When Republicans regained a majority in the Senate after the 1994 elections and McConnell became chair of the committee, he transformed the Packwood investigation into a partisan mess.

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Here's the backstory: In late November 1992, the Washington Post reported that at least 10 lobbyists and former Packwood staffers said they had been sexually harassed by Packwood. Several of the women claimed that Packwood had grabbed them or forcibly kissed them until they protested or pushed him away.

The story detonated a Washington scandal. Within a week, Packwood acknowledged the accusations, claiming his conduct was the result of a substance abuse problem. He called for a Senate ethics committee investigation of his own behavior. Bob Dole, then the Republican Senate minority leader, echoed Packwood's call for an investigation. "The quicker the better," he said. In subsequent weeks, several more women came forward. A former Packwood campaign volunteer told the Associated Press that Packwood had tasked her with gathering dirt on his accusers, and an official ethics inquiry was under way.

In the next year, Senate ethics committee staff interviewed 150 people across the country. This yielded 4,000 pages of sworn testimony and 1,000 pages of supporting documents. The investigators also collected new accusations from several women who had not spoken to the press.

Throughout this phase of the investigation, McConnell, the senior Republican on the committee, won praise from Democrats who had previously regarded him as the GOP's junkyard dog. McConnell joined Democrats on the ethics committee in turning down a deal with Packwood to weaken the investigation, and he encouraged dozens of Republicans to vote on the Senate floor to subpoena Packwood's diaries—audio tapes in which Packwood described his sexual misconduct in lewd detail.

Despite that Senate vote, Packwood held up the probe for about a year by challenging the subpoena for his diaries in federal court. As a result, it took the Senate ethics committee until December 1994 to wrap up its review of Packwood's diaries. (The committee, by that time, was also investigating whether Packwood had altered the diaries and whether Packwood had instructed lobbyists to offer his ex-wife a job in order to lower his alimony payments.) The panel was on track to decide, in early 1995, whether Packwood had broken any laws or ethics rules. By tradition, if the committee decided Packwood had broken any laws, public hearings and testimony would take place on the Senate floor before the committee decided what consequences Packwood would face.

That's when McConnell engaged in partisan obstructionism.

With Republicans now in the majority, McConnell, as chair of the Senate ethics committee, took control of the Packwood inquiry. And the investigation suddenly slowed down. As the committee missed its projected deadline for voting on public hearings by several months, McConnell dodged questions about where the investigation stood.

In mid-May, the committee announced it had acquired sufficient evidence to hold public hearings on the allegations. Its investigation had substantiated "18 instances of kissing, grabbing, groping or propositioning women," often by force, the New York Times reported.

It was unprecedented for such serious ethics charges not to result in public hearings. But McConnell battled to keep the ensuing proceedings against Packwood closed. With Democrats demanding public hearings, McConnell canceled an ethics committee vote on holding such hearings without explanation. In the following weeks, he allowed committee debates over whether to hold public proceedings to drag on without a vote.

In July, fed-up Senate Democrats pushed for a vote before the full Senate on holding hearings. McConnell responded with a threat, according to the Washington Post:

Senate sources said McConnell told [Sen. Barbara] Boxer on Tuesday that he would hold [ethics] hearings on two prominent Democrats if Boxer persisted in plans to force the issue of public hearings on Packwood.

According to the sources, McConnell approached committee member Barbarba Mikulski, D-Md., and told her, "You go find Barbara Boxer and tell her if she brings this amendment to the Senate floor, I'll be having hearings on Daschle and Chappaquiddick."

This was a reference to the 1969 incident involving the drowning of a woman companion of Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and to allegations earlier this year that Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., may have intervened improperly on behalf of South Dakota air charter company.

The sources said Boxer confronted McConnell later and asked him if he was threatening her.

He responded, "I'm not threatening you; I'm promising you," a source said.

The Associated Press recounted it this way:

"I want you to tell her (Boxer) if she does that, we will offer amendments for hearings on Daschle and Chappaquidick. It will work both ways," McConnell reportedly said. "I want you to tell her that right away."

At the time, political observers speculated that McConnell was trying to save Republicans from embarrassment. His refusal to hold public hearings generated huge controversy, with editorial pages in Kentucky and beyond calling for McConnell to reverse course. The Kentucky House and Senate both passed resolutions urging McConnell to allow public hearings, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. Sen. Richard Bryan (D-Nev.), the ranking Democrat on the ethics committee, publicly criticized McConnell. "There is simply no reason for the committee to delay further," he told reporters. "I know of no reason the ethics committee has not met, nor any reason why the committee has not voted on holding public hearings." McConnell promptly canceled another meeting of the ethics committee. He said he would not call a new one until Democrats quit demanding public hearings.

The next day, July 21, McConnell hinted on the Senate floor that he would kick off retaliatory investigations. "If Sen. Boxer takes us on another such frolic and detour, it will only further distract us and prevent us from concluding this important case," he said. "So if we find ourselves on the floor in the coming days debating legislation regarding hearings in the Packwood case or any other subject related to ethics committee procedures, I will be prepared, and I am sure others will be prepared, to discuss and debate congressional action on misconduct cases in the past and other relevant issues."

But early the following month, Boxer forced a Senate vote on her proposal to hold public hearings on Packwood. Republicans, at McConnell's urging, filibustered, and a vote to break the filibuster failed.

The Senate ethics committee finally concluded the Packwood case the next month, on September 6, when senators returned from their summer recess. In a unanimous vote, the six members of the ethics committee, including McConnell, recommended that the Senate expel Packwood. By then, two more women had approached the committee claiming Packwood had harassed them. One of them said this had occurred when she was 17 years old. Packwood resigned a day after the committee vote. The full investigation had taken nearly three years. No public hearings were ever held.

"I am more than happy to stake my reputation on the way I handle a case," McConnell said in the aftermath. And now, he's using the episode to appeal to women voters: A 2013 "Women for Team Mitch" rally featured a female Kentucky lawyer who told the rallygoers, "The way Sen. McConnell responded to that situation was perfect." With a sexual-harassment scandal now dogging a state Democratic lawmaker in Kentucky, McConnell has been pointing to his actions in the Packwood scandal as exemplary.

In response, the campaign for McConnell's Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, circulated a New York Times editorial from 1995 that decried McConnell's "bullying tactics" during the Packwood scandal. "It is improper for Mr. McConnell to hold the Packwood matter hostage to unrelated issues," the editorial said, referencing McConnell's Chappaquiddick threats. "That is an abuse of his power as chairman."

"McConnell now must resort to rewriting history to save the only job he cares about: his own," a Grimes spokeswoman wrote in an email.

"One fundamental problem Alison Lundergan Grimes has with reality here in Kentucky is that she actually believes the New York Times editorial page is the arbiter of truth and fact," Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the McConnell campaign, wrote in an email. "The internet would be a good resource for her to find out how Senator McConnell led the fight to expose and expel a senior member of his own party for egregious sexual harassment of women in the Senate." Moore added that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) praised McConnell's actions shortly after Packwood resigned.

This is not the first time McConnell has highlighted the Packwood scandal during a campaign. In his 1996 reelection effort, he ran an ad during the summer Olympics boasting that he "took the lead" in ousting Packwood. McConnell, the ad said, had displayed "courage and independence—rare qualities in Washington these days."


Molly Redden
Reporter

Molly Redden is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. RSS | Twitter

War against women? No such thing. Manufactured bullshit.

In care you'd like to deal with some facts, codface:


The Solyndra Story

—By Kevin Drum
| Sun Sep. 25, 2011 9:34 AM PDT

116
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If you're interested in reading a bit of background on Solyndra now that it's become a political football, the LA Times has a pretty good piece in today's paper:

To grasp the saga of Solyndra's rapid rise and even faster fall, one has to understand the dazzling appeal of its product. The company's advancement in solar power was hailed as an invention so brilliant that it blinded everyone to the truth: Solyndra never had much of a chance in a fast-changing market.

"It was revolutionary," said Walter Bailey, a former Macquarie Capital investment banker who specialized in green technology and visited Solyndra in 2008. "You had some of the smartest money in the world getting behind it. It was a real company with a huge factory and an extremely unique product.

"The only problem," said Bailey, now a senior partner at boutique investment bank Focus Capital in New York, "was that it never penciled out."

There's nothing in this piece about the politics of Solyndra, just a straight-ahead explanation of who they were, why their technology was so dazzling, and why they failed. It's worth a read if you're not already up on all this.

Or this from the NYT:

The Phony Solyndra Scandal
By JOE NOCERA
Published: September 23, 2011

If Brian Harrison and W. G. Stover, the two Solyndra executives who took the Fifth Amendment at a Congressional hearing on Friday, ever spend a day in jail, I’ll stand on my head in Times Square.

It’s not going to happen, for one simple reason: neither they, nor anyone else connected with Solyndra, have done anything remotely criminal. The company’s recent bankruptcy — which the Republicans are now rabidly “investigating” because Solyndra had the misfortune to receive a $535 million federally guaranteed loan from the Obama administration — was largely brought on by a stunning collapse in the price of solar panels over the past year or so.

The company’s innovative solar panels, high-priced to begin with, became increasingly uncompetitive in the marketplace. Solyndra didn’t have enough big commercial customers to create the necessary economies of scale. And although Harrison and Stover remained optimistic up to the bitter end — insisting six weeks before the late-August bankruptcy filing that the company was going to be fine — they ultimately failed to raise additional capital that would have allowed Solyndra to stay in business.

The Republicans are trying to make that optimism appear sinister, but if we’ve learned anything from the financial crisis, it is that wishful thinking in the face of a collapsing market is not a crime. Otherwise, Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, would be wearing prison garb.

Harrison and Stover are on the hot seat. Anything they say in their defense — even an off-hand remark — can and will be used against them. Their lawyers would be fools if they didn’t insist that their clients take the Fifth Amendment.

Do the Republicans know this? Of course. Do they care? Of course not. For an hour and a half on Friday morning, they peppered the two men with questions about this “taxpayer ripoff,” as Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, described it, knowing full well that Harrison and Stover would invoke their constitutional right to remain silent. Joe McCarthy would have been proud.

The purpose of the hearing — indeed, the point of manufacturing a Solyndra investigation in the first place — is to embarrass the president. That’s how Washington works in the modern age: the party out of power gins up phony scandals aimed at hurting the party in power.

Undoubtedly, the Solyndra “scandal” will draw a little blood: there are some embarrassing e-mails showing the White House pushing to get the deal done quickly so it could tout Solyndra’s green jobs as part of the stimulus package.

But if we could just stop playing gotcha for a second, we might realize that federal loan programs — especially loans for innovative energy technologies — virtually require the government to take risks the private sector won’t take. Indeed, risk-taking is what these programs are all about. Sometimes, the risks pay off. Other times, they don’t. It’s not a taxpayer ripoff if you don’t bat 1.000; on the contrary, a zero failure rate likely means that the program is too risk-averse. Thus, the real question the Solyndra case poses is this: Are the potential successes significant enough to negate the inevitable failures?

I have a hard time answering “no.” Most electricity today is generated by coal-fired power plants, operated by monopoly, state-regulated utilities. Because they’ve been around so long, and because coal is cheap, these plants have built-in cost advantages that no new technology can overcome without help. The federal guarantees help lower the cost of capital for technologies like solar; they help spur innovation; and they help encourage private investment. These are all worthy goals.

To say “no” is also to cede the solar panel industry to China, which last year alone provided some $30 billon in subsidies for its solar industry. Over all, the American solar industry is a big success story; it now employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter.

But solar panel manufacturing — a potential source of middle-class jobs, and an important reason the White House was so high on Solyndra, which made its panels in Fremont, Calif. — is another story. Not so long ago, China made 6 percent of the world’s solar panels. Now it makes 54 percent, and leads the world in solar panel manufacturing. Needless to say, the U.S. share of the market has shrunk. The only way America can manufacture competitive solar panels is to come up with innovative technologies that the Chinese can’t replicate. Like, for instance, Solyndra’s.

At the hearing on Friday, several of the Republican congressmen boasted that, in passing the continuing resolution to keep the government running the day before, they had succeeded in slashing the program that had made the loan to Solyndra. It’s true: of the $4 billion that remained in the program, $1.5 billion was cut.

But the real winner isn’t the American taxpayer or even the House Republicans. It’s the Chinese solar industry.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 24, 2011, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Phony Solyndra Scandal.

The Koch Brothers and Solyndra.

The Koch brothers are going after solar panels
Homeowners and businesses that wish to generate their own cheap, renewable energy now have a force of conservative political might to contend with, and the Koch brothers are leading the charge. The L.A. Times, to its credit, found the positive spin to put on this: Little old solar “has now grown big enough to have enemies.”

The escalating battle centers over two ways traditional utilities have found to counter the rapidly growing solar market: demanding a share of the power generated by renewables and opposing net metering, which allows solar panel users to sell the extra electricity they generate back to the grid — and without which solar might no longer be affordable. The Times reports on the conservative heavyweights making a fossil fuel-powered effort to make those things happen:


The Koch brothers, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and some of the nation’s largest power companies have backed efforts in recent months to roll back state policies that favor green energy. The conservative luminaries have pushed campaigns in Kansas, North Carolina and Arizona, with the battle rapidly spreading to other states.

…The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a membership group for conservative state lawmakers, recently drafted model legislation that targeted net metering. The group also helped launch efforts by conservative lawmakers in more than half a dozen states to repeal green energy mandates.

“State governments are starting to wake up,” Christine Harbin Hanson, a spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, said in an email. The organization has led the effort to overturn the mandate in Kansas, which requires that 20% of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources.

“These green energy mandates are bad policy,” said Hanson, adding that the group was hopeful Kansas would be the first of many dominoes to fall.

The group’s campaign in that state compared the green energy mandate to Obamacare, featuring ominous images of Kathleen Sebelius, the outgoing secretary of Health and Human Services, who was Kansas’ governor when the state adopted the requirement.

What’s especially disappointing is that for a while now, we’ve been hearing about how solar power is actually gaining traction in red states, with conservatives switching the focus from that liberal scourge, renewable energy, to something their base hates even more: taxes. Even Barry Goldwater Jr. has spoken out against the idea of allowing utilities to charge a monthly fee to the owners of rooftop solar panels, or what he and other advocates refer to as a “solar tax.”

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum bemoans the resurgence of knee-jerk opposition to solar:


There are dozens of good reasons that we should be building out solar as fast as we possibly can—plummeting prices, overdependence on foreign oil, poisonous petrostate politics, clean air—but yes, global warming is one of those reasons too. And since global warming has now entered the conservative pantheon of conspiratorial hoaxes designed to allow liberals to quietly enslave the economy, it means that conservatives are instinctively opposed to anything even vaguely related to stopping it. As a result, fracking has become practically the holy grail of conservative energy policy, while solar, which improves by leaps and bounds every year, is a sign of decay and creeping socialism.

-more-

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/21/the_koch_brothers_are_going_after_solar_panels/

Wow a high class liberal source. Still smells like the sewer.

No, private spas in some offices were not out of line, not one bit.

I would like to see his bonus check. Bonehead.

<snicker>

I'm surprised you're able to smell sewer, because you're full of shyt!

They're false because you say so? Document it.

The Koch's don't care much for mass transit either---

Mass Transit is now illegal in Tennessee

http://able2know.org/topic/242212-1

It seems that anything that might compete with the Koch brother's dynasty is worthy of attack.

Rap

Nice try, carpface. Do even you know what you mean?

I already have showing proof the deportation numbers are fudged by aliens caught at the border and returned. That stat was never added to deportations before Obama. Start reading.

[quoteblah blah blah blah blah][/quote]

Typical response from cooppoop.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3146999/posts

Liars, manipulators, brothers in corruption.

ColdDoper is typical of someone who's critical thinking skills are severely limited. With ColdDope it really boils down to 'My mind is already made up, don't confuse me with facts to the contrary.'

Rap

Critical thinking would expose Islam for what it is. You are as scared of that as you are scared of freedom. Do not tell me about critical thinking.

I was happy to see that Obama won the Boston Marathon.

BTW, the GOP is so full of hypocrites. They scream about Obama breaking the law in connection with his executive orders. However, they support the deadbeat rancher in Nevada who owes the taxpayers over $1 million in grazing fees. He lost in court twice, but still grazes his cattle illegally.